Opened more than 85 years ago, Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion remains a beauty on the western beach.

On hot summer days from the 1890s until August 1950, streetcars would rumble along Toronto streets stopping for children with bathing suits and carrying towels. They could climb aboard for a free ride to the intersection of Queen, King and Roncesvalles, where the car would turn south, pass over the railway tracks and head west down a gentle slope.

The destination was not the middle of the Gardiner Expressway, as it would be today, but the Sunnyside Beach area. Toronto provided this free "bathing car" service to children in order to bring them to Sunnyside – or to three free "bathing ferries" – so they could cool down in Lake Ontario. An added bonus: the land adjacent to the beach was home to an amusement park.

To feel truly isolated from the city today, sit on one of the benches in front of the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion and look directly north. It's like being inside the primitive 1980s video game Frogger: two lanes of cyclists, eight lanes of Lake Shore Blvd., six lanes of the Gardiner Expressway, and finally the railway tracks. All this is a more formidable barrier than the alligators and floating logs players dodged in Frogger.

Floating logs here are not such a far-fetched idea, since the area up to the railway was once all lake. Early in the 20th century, the Toronto Harbour Commission started the Sunnyside Reclamation Project to extend the shoreline with topsoil shaved off a 96-acre Pickering farm through which Hwy. 401 now runs. By 1922, nearly 197 acres had been reclaimed from the lake between the Humber River and Bathurst St.

Cut off from the city it still serves, Sunnyside has become a sort of gateway landmark that commuters note peripherally on their way into the city. Sitting on that bench out front, High Park to the north and Parkdale to the east seem much further away than they actually are. Yet despite being nearly paved over by modernity and progress, Sunnyside is alive and still a part of everyday Toronto – especially in the summer.

In many cities, when you stumble upon a relic like this from another age, it often has a melancholy feel of faded glory, and nothing seems more faded than festive architecture. The bathing pavilion was designed as a Roman bath by Alfred Chapman, the architect who was also behind the Princes' Gates at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, another of Toronto's drive-by landmarks.

For staid and provincial Toronto the Good, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion must certainly have stirred up exotic thoughts when it opened in 1922. While it was under construction in 1921, an article in The Globe suggested the new building will "look like a compromise between a pseudo-classical villa that should be perched on the steep slopes of some hill looking over olive gardens to the blue waters of the Mediterranean, and a casino at some ultra-sophisticated watering place, through the doors of which should stroll a smartly dressed throng of smart women and blasé men bent on a little turn at the tables."

Archival photos suggest reality was often a little more down to earth and fun: huge crowds of people in itchy- and hot-looking bathing suits packing the beach around the pavilion. Old beach photos are always jam-packed with people until about the early 1970s, by which point pool culture and the Gardiner (the Sunnyside-area stretch was completed in 1958) had sucked the life away from this most magical of public spaces.

Before the mid-1950s demolition of the amusement park to make room for the highway, Metro Toronto Chair Fred ("Big Daddy") Gardiner said, "We can't have this honky-tonk at the main entrance to the city on both sides of the main expressway."

Sunnyside is an interesting place precisely because it exists somewhere between those high-class Mediterranean looks and a honky-tonk sensibility. During the Depression, Sunnyside was known as the "poor man's Riviera" – it had been built in a manner that suggested even the common man or woman deserved to feel glamorous now and then. It's fitting that the first Miss Toronto contest was held here in 1926.

After falling into disrepair and being threatened with demolition in the 1970s, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion was designated a historical site in 1975. The city renovated it in 1980.

When you stand in front of it today, it's easy to conjure up the pavilion's old sense of grandeur. Staircases sweep upstairs to the open-air dance floors, where wedding photo shoots and occasional summer electronic music parties have replaced the big band swing that you can almost hear echoing up in the rafters, where these imaginary sounds compete with the constant hum of the traffic nearby. Wandering inside and out on quiet summer days you get a sense of the people who have passed through this place.

What if their ghosts returned to walk the courtyard and dance floor? It's likely they wouldn't notice much change, as the essence of Sunnyside remains all these decades beyond their time. Perhaps if they went down the front steps, the shock of the Lake Shore and the Gardiner would rattle them – who knew the automobile would go on to change the landscape quite so much – and the skyscrapers to the east and west along Lake Ontario might seem like a World's Fair dream.

Still, the interior courtyard continues to feel "exotic," even if some of the decorative fountains have been filled with cement. Originally, both sides of the pavilion were open-air changing areas for men and women, with 7,700 lockers. Today only the east side serves this purpose – and does double duty for both sexes – for the massive Gus Ryder outdoor pool next door. Added in 1925, the pool was built to attract more paying customers, because the water in Lake Ontario was slightly too cold for comfort. The concrete break walls built off shore were also an effort to "warm up" the water for swimmers. Though good for rowers and dragon boat enthusiasts, they have the unintended consequence of reducing the circulation in the water, leaving it murky and stale.

Toronto has swimmable and even clean beaches, but Sunnyside isn't one of them. Nobody swims here except the swans, which watch, with their patrician aloofness, the beach volleyball players on the sand.

In the café and on the lively patio, Toronto's citizens – now more multicultural – still mix, though some details at Sunnyside aren't quite right. The café uses too-cheap plastic garden chairs, tacky catering equipment is stored in various corners, and the iron railing around the café is flimsy. But the thing about a honky-tonk is it's a wonderful spectacle and great fun that doesn't discriminate. And despite Big Daddy Gardiner's opinion, all the varied activity around Sunnyside is good and should be encouraged. Sunnyside puts on some strong regal airs, but it's not a relic. If our ghostly visitors from the past stayed long enough, they might change into shorts and T-shirts and spike a few volleyballs, then order a pitcher of beer.

Shawn Micallef is senior editor at Spacing magazine.

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